“Hello World” Stories

I’ve always tried really hard to fight against “technical stories”. These are supposedly user stories but which are really framed as a solution to a problem and really just technical tasks. In “Turning Technical Tasks Into User Stories” I looked at how it’s often possible to elevate these from an obvious solution to a problem back up to a problem which needs to be solved. At this point you may discover there are other, hopefully cheaper, solutions to the problem which have been missed in the original analysis either because things have changed or different people are doing the thinking.

On the flip-side there are occasionally times where, after having looked at a few related stories, it’s apparent that they all require the same underlying mechanism to work. One common solution to this is to bulk up the first story with the technical work and let the rest flow through as normal. This way you have no technical work on your backlog per-se as it’s all hidden in the stories.

Transparency

What I don’t like about this approach is that one story arbitrarily gets hit with a load of extra work, which, if you’re using historical data to stick a finger in the air for estimation of similar work later, skews the average somewhat. It also means that from a visibility perspective one story takes longer while the mechanism is being built.

One way I’ve found to address this has been to pull out the bare bones of the technical work into a “Hello, World!” story [1]. This story is framed around building the skeleton of the mechanism that will be used to drive the implementation of the subsequent features. The aim is keep the scope minimal enough that we avoid speculating while still delivering something which stands on its own two feet and remains clearly visible on the board.

Value Proposition

While the value to the end-user is in the eventual feature, the value in the mechanism is proving to the development team that the basic approach seems sound. With the skeleton built, the idiosyncrasies around each individual feature can then be dealt with appropriately at the right time and accounted for in the usual way.

To be clear this is not about doing a spike or building a prototype, although that may have happened earlier to gain the knowledge needed to undertake this piece of work. No, here we’re talking about building the bare bones of a real mechanism along with the most basic feature possible.

The reason I’ve called these “Hello World” Stories is probably self-evident, it alludes to the classic program many have chosen as their first – to write “Hello, World!” to the console. In this context the name is intended to conjure up simplicity and remind us that what we’re doing is delivering the minimum required to make the platform viable. We probably won’t literally write “Hello, World!” to the console, but it may a log message instead that we can then observe and monitor, or be a message on a queue that we can see discarded. Essentially whatever we can do to make its effects observable without wasting any real effort or leaving it partially complete.

Based on the classic INVEST acronym we should strive to make every unit of work: Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small and Testable. By splitting it out from one of the arbitrary features it becomes more independent, negotiable, estimable and small which can be useful should short-term priorities change. And by extending the scope from a pure mechanism just a little bit further to the most trivial feature possible we make it more testable from a technical perspective, even if not from a product viewpoint. Most importantly, however, is it valuable in its own right? I think sometimes splitting the mechanism out gives value by making the I,N,E,S and T more tangible. In particular breaking work down into smaller deliverable units is often the most valuable practice even if occasionally the end-user has nothing initially to show for it.

Ultimately, I guess, I can’t ever remember anyone complaining they had broken their work down into pieces that were so small they were too visible.

 

[1] I’m sure there is an argument about this not being a “story” per-se but just a “task”. However I prefer to call it a story because our “Hello, World!” realization should have a grounding in the real world, even if it is more abstract than what the end-user will eventually receive.

[2] There is an assumption here that we’ve already decided we cannot or do not want to solve the dependent features in different ways, probably because it would be far more costly (in the long run) than briefly delaying them by building a common pillar.